Version 0.6

NUMA Status

This document contains the current status of NUMA-related programs and patches. These items are divided into three categories:

Default actions. These are programs and patches that seek to improve performance and usability of Linux on NUMA hardware systems in absence of any NUMA-awareness in the applications.
Simple binding. These are programs and patches that allow simple manual control of what processes run where and where memory is placed. These are expected to be useful in benchmarking situations and for simple production workloads.
Abstract binding. These are programs and patches that allow more abstract specification of the relationships between elements of a complex application and the underlying hardware. SGI's "memory locality domains" is one example of abstract binding, as are the features in the DYNIX/ptx, Digital Unix, and AIX operating systems that allow processes to be attached to each other (so that they migrate as a set).

Some of these items are already in the Linux 2.4 kernel, look for code under CONFIG_NUMA.

Status Summary

This section lists the status of various features, programs, and patches for NUMA on Linux. Please note that an item's appearance in this table does not necessarily mean that it will appear in the Linux kernel. In fact, in some cases, a given item may have a place in these tables only to track the discussion showing that it is a Bad Idea. As such, there may be items in these tables that conflict with each other and with common sense.

Default Actions

Item	Patches	ARM	Compaq Wildfire	Fujitsu	IA64 DiG	IA64 SN1	IBM NUMA-Q	Intel IA32	NEC Azusa	SGI MIPS64
CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM
generic support
	(in 2.4)	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-*
	Patch available for 2.4. See discontig-devel mailing list for more info.	-	-	-	-*	-	-	-	-	-<
	CONFIG_NONLINEAR is under development	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-<
arch support	(in 2.4)	Y			Patch available discontig-devel	Y	Patch available Pat Gaughen			Y*
Memory Classes: User Memory	(in 2.4)					Y				Y*
Memory Classes: kmalloc()
Memory Classes: kmem_cache_alloc() (node-aware slab allocator)	In development Tony Luck
Default Memory Binding	(in 2.4)									Y*
Replication
Kernel Text					Patch available
Kernel Modules
User Text
User Libraries
Read-Only Mappings					Patch available
Read-Mostly Mappings
Per-Node kswapd
	Samuel Ortiz
	Bill Irwin (for rmap kernels)
Per-Node reclaimd
NUMA-Aware Scheduler
	O(1) scheduler (in 2.5)	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
	Andrea Arcangeli	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
	Hubertus Franke	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
	Erich Focht	-	-	-	-*	-	-	-	-	-
	Davide Libenzi	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
Kernel-Subsystem NUMA-ization
Multipath I/O	(related code in 2.4, device-specific patches available)
Migration
Page
Process
I/O-Based
NUMA-Aware Locking	Patch available				Y*			Y
Tools
NUMA-Aware
NUMA-Aware Development
Performance Monitoring

Simple Binding

Item	Patches	ARM	Compaq Wildfire	Fujitsu	IA64 DiG	IA64 SN1	IBM NUMA-Q	Intel IA32	NEC Azusa	SGI MIPS64
Topology Discovery
Kernel level	Kanoj						In development Paul Dorwin			Y*
userlevel API							In development Paul Dorwin
Dynamic Reconfiguration
Bind Tasks to CPU(s)
sched_setaffinity()/sched_getaffinity() syscalls	in 2.5	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
numa api	patch available Matt Dobson	-	-	-	-	-	-*	-	-	-
sysmp() syscall	avail. for 2.2							Y
Bind Tasks to Node(s)
numa api	patch available Matt Dobson	-	-	-	-	-	-*	-	-	-
Bind Memory to Node(s) (first touch, stripe, etc.)
numa api	patch available Matt Dobson	-	-	-	-	-	-*	-	-	-
Bind Tasks to I/O Devices
Bind Memory to I/O Devices
Tools and Commands								pset avail. for 2.2
Create a NUMA API
numa api	patch available Matt Dobson	-	-	-	-	-	-*	-	-	-

Abstract Binding

Item	Patches	ARM	Compaq Wildfire	Fujitsu	IA64 DiG	IA64 SN1	IBM NUMA-Q	Intel IA32	NEC Azusa	SGI MIPS64
Specify Memory Locality Domains	Cpumemsets patch is available for 2.4. There is also a design doc availablefor cpumemsets.
Link Tasks Together
Virtualize Resource Names
Linking/Binding Hints

* = item was developed on this platform

This document is maintained by Pat Gaughen, please send email to Pat (gaughen at users.sourceforge.net) with modifications/deletions/additions for this page.